Now the problem is that after having joined the host to the domain
sometimes everything works fine and the host manages to join the domain
on startup but sometimes this seems to fail - I think that the join
process times out as the DC in the Guest VM does
not start up in time. In this case the firewall tells me that the host
is connected to a "public network" instead of the "domain network" and I
cannot connect to the server via remote desktop as this is not allowed
by default. If I disable
and reenable the network adapter the "domain network" is recognized
fine but this has to be done manually.

The solution:

In the meantime I am pretty sure that I solved the problem:

On my host I had entered two DNS servers: The first was the IP of the
Server Essentials Guest VM and the second was Google's DNS server
(8.8.8.8); my idea was to have access to the internet even if my Guest
VM DNS does not run.

Now I am pretty sure that
this second DNS server confused the firewall configuration on startup -
it could not detect the primary DNS because the Guest still has not
started up, but then saw this second DNS server and fell back to "public
network" instead of the desired "domain network"
mode. After removing Google's DNS server from the IP v4 configuration
now the host seems to start up fine and always ends up in the "domain
network".

Delayed domain join?

I really like the idea to delay domain joining on start up but I
have not found a way to do this. I only found how to add longer
timeouts but this is not really solving all problems:

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